U.S. Patent No. 2,026,082 was granted to Charles Darrow on this date in 1935 for his creation of the board game Monopoly. Parker Brothers, the game manufacturer, was included in the patent. (A 1935 game box is at the top.)

The game was (and is) a variation of a board game called The Landlord’s Game, which had been around for decades by 1935. That game was created by Elizabeth Magie, who earned a patent (number 748,626) for her creation in 1904. Monopoly bears more than a passing resemblance to her creation: The Landlord’s Game included “Chance” cards.
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“This Is The Way It Was,” read the tagline for the Hammer Film Productions movie One Million Years B.C. Well, no. The film, which opened in British theaters fifty years ago today, showed Ray Harryhausen-animated dinosaur dolls attacking humans, but it also offered Raquel Welch in a strategically creative (or creatively strategic) fur bikini. (The film opened in American movie theaters in 1967.)

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The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty was performed for the first time on this date in 1879 at the Royal Bijou Theatre in Paignton, Devon, in England. (Poster at top.)
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“I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”—Black Elk, speaking about the Massacre at Wounded Knee

The Massacre at Wounded Knee took place on this date in 1890. A detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry opened fire while disarming two Lakota groups at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The detachment, some 500 strong, quickly killed 90 Lakota men and 200 women and children. (By some estimates many more were killed.) After a three-day blizzard, the dead, scattered where each man, woman, and child fell and died and now frozen to the ground, were buried without ceremony in a mass grave.
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